Perfect Grave

by Rick Mofina

  “Not much, just that something happened because you quit and Vern kind of disappeared, or something.”

  “Vern was a seasoned uniformed police officer. A Vietnam veteran. A diehard street cop who took me under his wing. He taught me everything about police work. How to handle myself when someone takes a swing at me, or if I was outnumbered. Taught me the basics of investigations, about police politics, how to make a judgment call, when to let somebody go with a warning, or when to be the meanest mother on the street.”

  “You got along, then?”

  “We were like brothers.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We’d been partnered for just over a year, in uniform and on patrol. In total command of our zone. Handling crap, the thin blue line. I loved my job and being Vern’s partner. God, it was good. Then one day we get called to an armed robbery in progress and—”

  Henry rubbed his face.

  “I’ve never really talked about this.”

  “I know, Dad, take it easy.”

  “The call went all weird on us. It ended with a person getting shot. The suspect was arrested and pleaded guilty.”

  “Can you tell me who got shot, Dad?”

  His father stared at him, his eyes clouded with fear.

  “Can you tell me the date?” Jason pulled out his notebook.

  “Put that away, son. Please and let me finish.”

  “Why?”

  “Please.”

  Jason tucked his notebook away.

  “More coffee?” the gum-chewing waitress asked.

  They both accepted refills from her.

  “Dad,” Jason said, after she left, “I looked through the old clippings from the time you were on the job, armed robberies, shootings. Your name never came up.”

  “Not every cop who responds to a call gets named in the news reports,” Henry said. “All I can say is it was tragic.” He rubbed his lips. “It took a toll on me and it took a toll on Vern.”

  “What happened?”

  Henry stared into his black coffee.

  “We gave so much to the job, we became the job. We put our lives on the line every time we went out. And in a split second, in a heartbeat, everything changes. Your life changes.”

  “Dad, what happened?”

  “Vern took things very hard. But he never said a word to me. So I never realized how things were eating him up, until that day.”

  “What day?”

  “The last day I saw him.”

  “When was that?”

  “One day, a few months later. Vern was late for work. I told the sergeant that his car had broken down, then I called Vern at his home. He answered. He was home alone. I told him I was swinging by to pick him up for our shift.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said—” Henry stopped to blink several times. “He said sure, pal, come and get me. So I got to his place. Knocked. No answer, so I tried the door. It was unlocked. I got in and the first thing I heard was the loud static scratching of an old vinyl record that had played to the end. I called for Vern but heard nothing.

  “The place was a mess. It smelled kind of bad, like nothing had been washed, or cleaned. Clothes were heaped, the TV was on but muted. Vern never had a hair out of place.

  “I called for him again, heard a muffled sound from a bedroom. The door was half open. When I entered I saw Vern in his uniform and he had this strange look on his face. He was holding his off-duty gun, a Colt. I thought he was cleaning it or something. Vern looks at it, looks at me—says ‘sorry, Henry’—sticks the gun in his mouth, and pulls the trigger. A portion of his skull and brain matter splashed over his wedding photo on the wall.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I don’t recall what happened after that. They told me that when they found me, I was on the floor cradling his head in my lap.”

  “Dad, I’m so sorry.”

  “Maybe a piece of me died with Vern that day. I was finished as a cop.”

  “Did he leave a note? What was he sorry for?”

  “No note. His wife walked out on him. That call had taken a toll on Vern and me.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  “I don’t want to get into that. This is hard for me.”

  “Sure. Sure.”

  “The thing is, after I packed it in, I got a small disability pension and started drinking. I swore I never ever wanted to touch a gun again.”

  “I understand.”

  “Now here I am, a private detective with Krofton and he’s issued this order for all of his people to get themselves licensed to be armed. I’m having a very hard time with it all.”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “It’s done.”

  “It’s done? Wow. Well, think of it as a good thing, that you’re strong enough to stare this business down and put it behind you and hope you’ll never have to use the damned gun.”

  Henry embraced Jason’s encouragement because it was what he needed to hear.

  “That’s what I’ll do.”

  Jason patted his father’s hand.

  “Thank you for telling me this, Dad. I understand things now.”

  “Thank you,” Henry said, “for not giving up on me, son.”

  “Are you kidding? We’re partners.” Jason spun the newspaper around with his story on the front page.

  “Maybe you could help me with this story, Dad?”

  Henry looked at the headline and Sister Anne Braxton’s picture.

  Jason ordered more coffee.

  Chapter Ninteen

  “No—I’ve—No! You’ve already connected me to that department—”

  Rhonda Boland failed to get the receptionist at the insurance company to understand Brady’s situation.

  “Would you just listen to me? Please. He’s just been diagnosed. Please, don’t put me on hold again, just listen, please—”

  The line clicked. Elevator music flowed into her ear. “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

  Rhonda squeezed the phone and stared at the mound of papers growing on her kitchen table. She’d circled the help-wanted ads in her search for a second job. They needed bartenders at the Pacific Eden Rose Hotel, which wasn’t far.

  Still holding, she considered her bank statements, employee benefit handbooks, forms, and insurance policies with fine print that only a lawyer could decipher. Even her late husband’s papers were on the table. Even though there was no chance that anything regarding Jack Boland could ever help her at this stage, Rhonda had dug them out anyway.

  Whatever it took to save Brady.

  There was nothing in Jack’s material. She pushed it all to the extreme end of the table and saw the booklet again. The one left by Gail, the volunteer from the support group, who’d visited earlier that morning.

  “The information here will help you, Rhonda. It’ll guide your decision on what and when to tell Brady,” Gail said.

  Still on hold, Rhonda took in the cover again. Beams of brilliant light parted the clouds over the title: Will I Go to Heaven?

  The line clicked. The receptionist had returned.

  “Yes I’m still holding,” Rhonda said. “Please, let me explain, I’ve got special circumstances and need to know—”

  More “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

  Rhonda shut her eyes and cursed, letting anger and fear roll through her. Hope no one you love ever gets sick. She reached for the booklet, then glanced at the clock over her sink. Brady would be home from school soon.

  That’s when she’d planned to tell him. Everything. She’d intended to tell him the moment they’d left the doctor’s office but couldn’t do it.

  “So am I kinda sick, or something, Mom?” he’d asked as they walked to the car.

  How do you tell your son that death is waiting for him? She couldn’t do it. Not there, in the parking lot.

  “The doctor’s not sure. He needs to check some things. Want some ice cream?”

  “Okay.”

  Rhonda had stalled for time. Gail at
the support group said it was a normal reaction, part of “the parental need to process the information.”

  Oh God, Brady would be home this afternoon.

  Rhonda stifled a sob, glanced at her fridge door. The story of their lives was there in a cluttered patch-work of odds and ends.

  Brady’s last report card. He had been doing so well before all this started. His gold certificate for his science project. He wanted to build passenger space jets. The birthday card he’d made for her. “My Mom Is The Best Mom In The World.” The Mariners calendar, marked with home and away games, her shifts at the supermarket, Brady’s appointments with Dr. Hillier. And the new specialist, Dr. Choy.

  The calendar was also marked with “D-Days.” Those were the days when payment was due for the debts Jack had left her. When he died suddenly, Rhonda was shocked to learn that his small business was on the verge of bankruptcy; she had no legal protection and next to no life insurance. It meant she had to close his business and slowly pay off his outstanding bills with her job as a supermarket cashier.

  Some days she hated Jack.

  Some days she missed him and mourned the time in her life when she had believed that Jack Boland was her salvation.

  Rhonda had grown up in the middle of nowhere in Utah, where her stepfather would beat her and her mother. Her mother seemed to just accept it. Her stepfather was an unemployed food inspector and a self-pitying bastard who blamed his life on “the goddamn government.” When he reached for a claw hammer to use on them, Rhonda packed her bags and bought a bus ticket to Las Vegas.

  She got a job at a bar off the Strip serving drinks to rollers, saved her tips, and took dance lessons because she wanted to be a showgirl, then an actress. She’d been in Vegas, dreaming her dream for some six years, thinking of leaving, when she met Jack Boland after serving him rum and Coke at the black-jack table. He was a quiet player who’d given her sad, warm smiles and huge tips for about a week before asking her out.

  Jack was a gentleman. A good-looking guy, in a dark mysterious way. Rhonda was not bothered by the fact he was about twenty years older than she was. He was a charmer, a professional gambler and pretty much a loner, who’d lived all over the country. He said that once he’d set his eyes on her, it was time to settle down.

  She told him she’d had enough of Vegas and wanted to start a family. Take a shot at the white-picket-fence dream with a good-hearted man.

  Jack smiled, said it was a good dream.

  “What do you say you and me roll the dice on dreams, Rhonda?”

  They got married and moved to Jack’s old hometown, Seattle, where he started a small landscaping business. He took out a loan for a big new truck, a couple of riding mowers, tillers, and all sorts of new equipment. He even subcontracted jobs to other small companies, creating the impression his one-man operation was larger than it was.

  They lived modestly.

  Jack stopped gambling and remained a private man. They didn’t go out much. After they were married, he told Rhonda he’d always been alone since he’d lost his family in a fire when he was a boy growing up in the midwest. It was something that haunted him and he never really talked about it. She soon found out that he was prone to brood, drink, lose his temper, punch a wall.

  But he never laid a hand on her.

  Still, it broke her heart because she’d thought she’d escaped Utah.

  Rhonda was no quitter. In the years after Brady was born, things changed. Jack appeared to find some peace. As Brady got older, Jack would take him along on landscaping jobs. But money got tight and Rhonda got a job at the supermarket to help with the bills.

  Every now and then, Jack would find a few bucks when things were dire. He’d say a big job had paid off. In her heart, Rhonda suspected Jack was gambling again but she never questioned him because his payoffs had always saved them.

  Still, Jack’s temper seethed near the surface as he complained about his business and not having the freedom to live the way a man should. He seemed to be battling something.

  Rhonda begged him to talk to her, but he refused and went off by himself, which made things worse because his rage seemed to be growing.

  One ugly night, Jack, in drunken fury, raised his hand to Rhonda. She seized it.

  “If you ever hit me, it’ll be the last time you see me and Brady.”

  Jack stared right through her like she wasn’t even there.

  Then one day she came home from a bad shift at work. That’s when she’d noticed Brady had a fresh bruise on his head. She asked about it at dinner.

  “What happened, sweetie?”

  Brady looked to Jack for the answer.

  “He banged it on my workbench helping me.”

  “Banged it on the bench? How the heck did that happen?”

  “That’s how it happened. So drop it,” Jack sucked air through his teeth while gnawing on a chicken wing.

  That night after Brady got into bed, Rhonda softly pressed him for more details.

  “Brady, what really happened?”

  “Mom, I was clumsy.”

  “You’re not clumsy. Tell me what happened.”

  “Dad said that I—Mom. I’m clumsy. I dropped a tool on Dad’s foot. Okay?”

  Her blood bubbled.

  “Did he hit you?”

  Brady turned to the wall.

  Rhonda marched from Brady’s room. Jack was on his sixth, or seventh, beer and still gnawing on chicken wings when she lit into him.

  “Did you hit him?”

  Jack glared at her while still chewing, his jaw muscles tightening.

  “He dropped a drill on my foot. I hardly touched him.”

  “You bastard!”

  “Don’t make this a big deal, Rhonda,” Jack gnawed on his chicken bone. “I’m warning you.”

  “You stupid coward.”

  Jack ground into the chicken, sprang to his feet, swung at her head, missed, shifted his weight to swing again, and suddenly his eyes widened and he clawed at his throat.

  He was choking.

  Rhonda thudded his back, wrapped her arms around him, put her hands together and tried to press into his upper chest. Jack fell to his knees, collapsing on their living room floor, gasped for several minutes, then stopped breathing.

  Right there.

  With Brady watching.

  Rhonda tried mouth-to-mouth and CPR while Brady called 911.

  There was nothing they could’ve done, the doctors said later.

  A chicken bone had become wedged in his throat.

  Rhonda was suddenly a young widowed mother, trapped in a maelstrom of horrible emotions that lasted for months. So when the doctor had asked if Brady had ever had a head injury, she couldn’t tell him the whole truth because she believed it had been all her fault.

  She feared that the doctor would call social services and—they could take Brady.

  There had been a point in her life when she truly believed Jack was her salvation. But it was so long ago it seemed like a distant, dying star. Little by little as each day passed, Jack had become a hard man to love. In fact, all the love she’d ever had for him evaporated the day she buried him.

  Brady was the only good thing to come out of her marriage.

  The only good thing in her life.

  And now, after all she’d been through, God has somehow seen fit to take Brady away from her. And now, as she tried to fight back tears, the line in her hand clicked and this woman at the insurance company was going to put her on hold—

  “No! Damn it! Don’t put me on hold again you, stupid, stupid—!”

  Rhonda slammed the phone down, drove her face into her hands in time to muffle her scream.

  Helpless. She was utterly helpless.

  Rhonda sat in her kitchen letting her anger ebb until she heard a noise.

  What was that?

  She stopped breathing to listen.

  Chapter Twenty

  It sounded as if something had fallen over in the garage.

  Rhonda w
aited and listened.

  Nothing.

  Strange.

  Was she so stressed that her mind was playing tricks on her? Maybe it was the echo of her own sob.

  No. She definitely heard something.

  It came from the garage. Maybe it was Brady and his friends? She glanced at the clock. It was a bit early for him to be home from school just yet. Besides, he didn’t like going in the garage much.

  Neither did she.

  It was like a mausoleum. That’s where Jack spent a lot of time. A lot of his stuff was still out there. Stuff she had trouble selling, or giving away. She’d better go check because, if she didn’t, it would trouble her tonight.

  She took the key from the peg.

  It was a two-car garage connected to the house with a breezeway. Rhonda hardly used it. This is silly. She was probably hearing things, she told herself, sliding the key in the side door.

  Dust motes swirled in the columns of late-afternoon sunlight shooting through the side window. Standing in the doorway, with her hand on the handle, Rhonda looked around.

  Three broken lawn mowers that he used to cannibalize for parts lined one wall. Two ladders were suspended on hooks on the opposite wall. Extra sheets of drywall and scrap pieces of plywood stood in one corner. The tall refrigerator was in another corner. Brady’s wading pool, his old tricycle, and baby things cluttered one area. Old baby toys and broken lawn furniture. The barbeque.

  Reminders of happier days.

  It was odd.

  She could feel a presence.

  Jack’s workbench was still cluttered with old tools. Junk, really. And such a mess. She should just toss everything. Next to the bench stood the row of his old mismatched file cabinets where he kept God knows what. Landscaper stuff. Not the important papers. Those all went to the accountant and lawyers.

  Nothing seemed out of place.

  Maybe the neighbor’s cat got in through a vent? Or a squirrel? Hopefully not a mouse.

  No. It was nothing.

  Rhonda tightened her hold on the door handle and prepared to leave. As she took a last look around, something caught her eye. The way the light reflected on the file cabinet. The middle drawer of the second cabinet was open.

  Now that’s strange.

  They’re all supposed to be locked. There’s nothing important in there but she distinctly remembered locking them all. She looked at the stuff in the drawer. Just useless files on lawns and maintenance. But how could that drawer be open?